By now, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people had acquired from the Menzies government the right to vote, the same right Menzies had been unwilling to move on in his first phase as prime minister in 1938. In 1962, the Commonwealth granted the franchise for federal elections in 1962, and states fell into line, with the last state to confirm the Indigenous right to vote being Queensland in 1965.
But anomalies ran on. One of Bandler’s motivations to achieve a referendum was that until now each state had made its own laws about Aborigines and the state laws needed to be overridden precisely because they created a patchwork of justice and injustice. Bandler argued that if as a Victorian Aborigine you crossed the New South Wales border you were required by law to go to Bridge Street in Sydney to get permission to visit any aunt and uncle on a reserve. A New South Wales Aborigine crossing into Queensland could be arrested without any other cause than his being at large. With a smile, she argued that migrants who had come to Australia recently had all the privileges and protections of federal law, but not Aborigines.
Indeed, Bandler and others were aware that Queensland was a conundrum. The Queensland reserves generally had the best housing and health facilities, and Queensland legislation provided the best employment protection revisions. But the state’s Aboriginal Acts were generally the most restrictive, and the Queensland administrators generally the most authoritarian and bureaucratic. By 1960, almost half of all Aboriginal Queenslanders were still controlled by special Acts, even though there had been reforms in 1956. Reserve dwellers in Queensland were subject to the dictate of superintendents, and the level of permitted control was like that found in gaols and mental asylums. The superintendent could prevent card games, dances and native practices that might give offence. He could order medical inspections or confiscate possessions that were ‘likely to be the subject or cause of a disturbance of the harmony, good order, or discipline of the reserve’. The use of alcohol and threatening or abusive language were prohibited, as was any act interpreted by the superintendent as ‘being subversive of good order and discipline’. The superintendent could also open mail and inflict corporal punishment. He could impose thirty-two hours of work without payment, and those who refused were locked up or fined. C.D. Rowley, a commentator who controversially argued that an Aborigine with any admixture of European blood is not a real Aborigine, visited Palm Island in 1964 and remarked that the inmates were treated as rather ‘dull, retarded children . . . people were sent to gaol, locked up in dormitories, put to work, presumably moved through the stages of housing, all as a result of paternal decisions for their own good’.
The reserves’ superintendents were thus policemen, judge and jury, and the court procedures were not based on the normal presumptions of the outer world. At Woorabinda Reserve in Queensland, of the 177 persons tried in 1956, and of the ninety-eight tried in 1962, all were found guilty by the presiding superintendent—a phenomenal conviction rate. Children under sixteen were imprisoned, and acts such as adultery and adult sexual intercourse, which were not offences in the outside world, were tried and punished on the reserves. People aware of all these conditions believed that they would be legislated out of existence after the referendum enabled the Federal government to do it.
The first of the sections of the Constitution under scrutiny in the 1967 referendum was Section 51: ‘The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to: . . . the people of any race, other than the aboriginal people in any state, for whom it is necessary to make special laws.’ The second was Section 127: ‘In reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, or of a State or other part of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted.’
It was a referendum in which, as the Cabinet acknowledged, television would play a large part. The referendum on 27 May saw the highest ‘Yes’ vote ever recorded in a Federal referendum, with 90.77 per cent voting nationally for changing Section 51 and annulling Section 127, with a majority success in each state and in the Federation as a whole. Simultaneously, a now forgotten referendum was put forward to increase the number of members of the House of Representatives. The question on the composition of Parliament received barely 45 per cent approval and failed the test.
After 1967’s success, for the first time Aboriginal people were counted as part of the Australian community. All seemed possible—not only the nullification of oppressive state laws, but also the enactment of liberating federal ones. It was promised that the first Minister for Aboriginal Affairs would be appointed. It turned out to be William Charles Wentworth, a direct descendant of the original W.C. Wentworth. He was an eccentric and likeable man who nonetheless was as much concerned with the infiltration of Aboriginal groups by Communists as with changing the equation between black and white. Yet by the end of the 1960s, few civil rights restrictions on Aborigines remained, although reserve dwellers in the Northern Territory and especially in Queensland were still controlled by special Acts.
As another result of the success of the referendum under the Liberal Prime Minister Harold Holt, a Queensland Aborigine named Neville Bonner joined the Liberal Party, and would be chosen to fill a vacancy as a senator in 1971.
There was one benefit the referendum would not deliver to Aboriginal people, and that was to alter the common-law proposition that at occupation by Europeans and their institutions, Australia was terra nullius, no man’s or woman’s land, up for grabs. From Hamersley in Western Australia across to Yirrkala in Arnhem Land and Cape York, a new mineral boom was coming to a head throughout the 1960s. The mineral geologist, scanning increasing swathes of remote Australia, was the hero of the decade.
In 1963, the people at the Yirrkala settlement in Arnhem Land sent a petition on bark to the House of Representatives protesting at the excision of 390 square kilometres of their land for the bauxite mining company Nabalco. They claimed they had never been consulted, and there is no reason to disbelieve the claim. While that was insulting, however, it was not illegal.
In 1964, the government decided that the Aboriginal population must be made to move from Mapoon on the west coast of Cape York, bauxite having been discovered on the settlement site. Many did not want to, wishing to remain close to their country, but they had no legal grounds to protest and no basis for a judicial appeal. The mining company, in this case Comalco, was by common law no trespasser on owned land. The Presbyterian mission, founded in part as a refuge from late-nineteenth-century massacres, had amongst its members the sole survivor of a family massacre who had helped build the Presbyterian chapel and was now about to see it burned down by the Queensland authorities, including personnel from the Department of Native Affairs and the police. The Queensland government wanted the Mapoon people to move further up the coast to Bamaga, as good as on the tip of the Cape, and temporarily suspended administrative and statutory protections to make it easier for their former charges to be forced away. There was persuasion backed by the threat of the burning of homes. The leader of the resistance was Mrs Jean Jimmy, who even when forced out never gave up the cause of a Mapoon return. She declared that ‘the DNA [the Department of Native Affairs] and the Church were not fair to us. When we refused to leave our homes in Mapoon, they closed the school, they left us without a flying doctor for seven months. The DNA ship came with police aboard and gave us an hour to pack some belongings and took us to sleep at the mission cottage guarded by four policemen like criminals.’ The next morning the DNA ship took them to Bamaga, where there were no extra homes and people were forced to take the Mapoon folk in. ‘I was given a room. We were told we would have a laundry and shower, but we wash our clothes like the old pioneers.’
Australian affluence and jobs were enlarged by the boom. It was an age when affluence or lower-middle-class comfort had reached a level of material well-being so marked in history that the young had the luxury of despising it. But Aboriginal communities, with terra nullius undermining th
eir position at every turn, were in a position where their only weapons to ensure just treatment were verbal and moral. For they did not own the earth beneath their feet.
THE GOOD LIFE
Between 1945 and 1965, real average weekly earnings increased by more than 50 per cent, and the five-day working week was standard along with three weeks of paid annual leave. By the early 1960s, a modern detached home on a quarter-acre block had become the norm; 70 per cent of city dwellers lived that way, which was amongst the highest urban home-ownership rates in the world. For decades to come, house ownership would remain the expectation of Australian people, and where it could not be achieved, it seemed like a denial of a personal right. Contrary to common belief, between 1947 and 1961 the number of married women in the workforce increased fourfold, and in 1950 the Arbitration Court had increased women’s pay to 75 per cent of the male basic wage.
The Good family, immigrants from Britain, saw themselves as fortunate parties to Australian prosperity and sent audio letters to relatives and friends in the early 1960s to celebrate it. In September 1963, Cliff and Gwen and their children, Robert (thirteen years), Andrew (six) and Malcolm (one), left London and emigrated to Perth. They had been influenced by television images of Australia and of athletes in cotton shirts at the sun-drenched 1962 Commonwealth Games in Perth. They had sent for literature and attended an evening of talks and films for potential migrants in which they felt, as Gwen Good said, ‘the warmth of Australia’. Cliff made up crates for the luggage, and the Goods sailed on the Fairsky from London. Gwen declared, ‘We came to Australia because the Almighty simply pushed us here.’ Sometimes the Goods would let other British immigrants use part of their tapes to send a message to relatives in England, but the tapes sent in return by their English relatives were often delayed by ‘nasty suspicious minds at Customs again’.
And yet the Goods had subscribed to their new life totally. Part of the purpose of the tapes was to get Gwen’s parents to join them in ‘this wonderful country’ with its ‘wonderful climate’. In 1965, young Andrew whistled the tune of ‘Click Go the Shears’ for his grandparents. When the family bought its first car—‘which we couldn’t afford in London’—they recorded the sound of the engine. Cliff praised the climate, and the treat it was to work in sunshine, but declared he must stay fit and thus had learned to body-surf. His first job was in a factory which had old-fashioned machinery and he thought the Australian manufacturer needed a bit of ‘geeing up’. By March 1965, Cliff was happier in a new job setting up and coordinating shop fitting. To show that not even Australia was immune from outside influence, Gwen recorded that ‘the kids have gone next door to watch The Beatles on television. You’ve probably heard of The Beatles. I think they made a bit of a stir when they came back from America.’ Soon the family itself had a television, with shows from the BBC.
Gwen told her relatives, ‘I swell with pride each morning when I open my large automatic refrigerator. The memories of food rationing have not conditioned me to the bulk-buying of food here. In the butcher’s shop yesterday my request for a quarter pound of liver for the cat was repeated loudly and incredulously, thus labelling me forever as a “Pommy” to the crowded shop, no doubt all of whom were waiting to buy at least a dozen steaks and half a sheep or both.’ Watching the rotary hoist clothesline spin around in the sunshine was a delightful contrast to the limpness and drizzle of the English Monday morning.
Unlike many other immigrants she was able to balance the poignant differences from home with the idea of the antipodean possibilities. ‘The crescent [moon] may have looked the wrong way up and the gum trees and palms seem strangely exotic, but the basic bond of understanding was there, and we knew that we were with people who, although they lived on the other side of the earth, had the same outlook and set of values as ourselves.’
In 1967, Gwen, who seems to have had plenty of verve, wrote to Erica Underwood of the ABC program The Women’s Hour, who invited her on to talk about her impressions as an immigrant. ‘We feel like guests in this country,’ said Gwen diplomatically, ‘and feel we should act as such and not too much like temporary little prima donnas.’ She must have been aware that there was a common view, reliable or not, of English migrants as adopting superior airs and generally complaining.
‘Did I tell you,’ she dictated for her relatives in Britain, ‘about the group of dissatisfied migrants who returned home last year? There were only about eleven families in all, but how the newspapers jumped on it . . . in fact some people at Fremantle booed the ship as the migrants left Australia . . . how can anyone expect 100 per cent success in a scheme involving so many thousands of individuals . . . Migration reminds me of a marriage. If we embark on either with the idea that if we fail we can always be divorced, it’s pretty certain we’ll spend years of futility and dissatisfaction before returning to our former states.’
AUSTRALIA’S FRONTLINE
From 1962, as an ally of the United States, Australia provided military advisors to South Vietnam to prevent the Viet Cong from uniting it with the Communist North. The Australian government had introduced military conscription in 1964, even before it became directly involved in South Vietnam. Names of twenty-year-olds were drawn by lottery, and those called up would serve for two years and could be sent overseas to fight. It was not known at the time that US president Lyndon Johnson had lobbied the Menzies government to conscript Australian men for Vietnam, just as MacArthur had urged Curtin to conscript Australians for overseas service. One dissenter was surprisingly the Australian army, which doubted its capacity to train reluctant conscripts.
From the early winter of 1965, young Australians began to be conscripted for the Vietnamese endeavour. Every few months, a politician or sporting hero drew a series of numbered wooden balls from a ballot box. If a young man’s birth date corresponded with the number on the balls drawn out, he was automatically conscripted. University students, married men, theological students and conscientious objectors could seek a deferral. Then those who passed their army interview and medical examination were called into the ranks. Two-thirds of those whose numbers were drawn did in fact end up serving in the army as conscripts. The first annual call-up, in mid-1965, drafted 4200 men. The next year two draws generated 6900 recruits, raising the army’s strength to 37,500. At its peak the lottery drafted four intakes of over two thousand twenty-year-olds per year. From 1967 to 1971 there would be about sixteen thousand national servicemen in the army, a little over a third of the total strength.
As soon as President Johnson made the fateful decision to introduce ground troops in 1965, Australia answered his request for support enthusiastically. In late 1968, America had half a million troops in Vietnam to Australia’s eight thousand. As in many post-1945 American adventures, the fact that Australia was an ally was perhaps more significant for Johnson than the numbers of troops. To a newly appointed American ambassador to Australia, Bill Crook, a gentlemanly Texan and devout Episcopalian, he would describe Australia as ‘our most respectable ally’, since he was more ambiguous about troops from the Republic of Korea. (The compliment was perhaps a little tarnished by the fact that at the time Johnson was ‘washing his hands’ in his White House bathroom after his afternoon nap.) In any case, Vietnam for Australia was an interesting instance of a post-World War II pattern of token support for American military policy, though of course it would prove to be more than a token for Australian casualties, physical and mental.
Even as early as 1954, the issue of how Vietnam was going to be divided was about to be settled by a Geneva Conference attended by the Minister for External Affairs, Richard Casey. He declared that ‘with the black cloud of Communist China hanging to the north, we must make sure that our children do not end up pulling rickshaws with hammer and sickle signs on their sides’. The DLP and the Federal Parliament agreed with his diagnosis of the threat. Paul Hasluck, who became Minister for External Affairs in 1964 after Garfield Barwick left to take a seat on the High Court, saw the border of Chin
a as the beginning of Australia’s front line. Until now the concentration of foreign policy had been on Malaya and Indonesia as the line of forward defence for Australia. But now the great danger existed at the parallel where North Vietnam met the American-supported republic of South Vietnam, into which some hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese Catholics had moved when Ho Chi Minh, North Vietnamese leader, proscribed religion and massacred any merely progressive nationalists.
The president of South Vietnam from 1954 was Ngo Dinh Diem, who was much boosted in the Australian press in general, and in the Catholic press in particular. Diem had lived for the two years up to May 1954 in Catholic seminaries in the south, from which base he lobbied Vietnamese in the United States and made useful contacts with important Americans such as Cardinal Francis Spellman. He lobbied Belgian support and that of the Vietnamese community in Paris.
In 1954, when he took government, he was reminded by President Eisenhower that his political future depended upon reform. Diem was an austere Catholic leader but believed in nepotism and appointed his brother as head of the armed forces, and passed his sister-in-law Madam Nhu’s moral code as law. This law suppressed prostitution, but also Buddhism and Taoism. Despite that, Diem remained the darling of the West; the Sydney Morning Herald described him as, ‘one of the most remarkable men in the new Asia . . . authoritarian in approach but liberal in principle’.
The Liberal Party backed Diem out of conviction but also to guarantee the support of the DLP, many of whom uncritically considered Diem a saint. The reality was that, as his power continued, Diem’s land-distribution policies impoverished peasants, and his ‘Denounce Communism’ campaign meant that the peasants were rounded up and the supposed Communists amongst them were arrested, beaten and, not infrequently, shot. Murder and torture were not uncommon, including wrapping barbed wire around the body, stripping skin off with pincers, or making people sit on the blade end of an entrenching tool. The final act was often to shoot the suspect through the ear. As one observer said, ‘His mentality was that of a Spanish inquisitor.’
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